Medical devices & diagnostics · Veterinary hematology
Moichor
An AI-assisted animal blood and cytology lab that started with birds and reptiles and now sells an in-clinic analyzer for dogs and cats. SEC filings show $11.3 million sold. No peer-reviewed validation exists.
The cells no machine could count
Put a drop of dog blood into a veterinary hematology analyzer and the machine does the work. Cells are sorted by size and by how they scatter light, and a complete blood count falls out in under a minute.
Put a drop of parrot blood into the same machine and it fails. Bird, reptile and amphibian red blood cells carry a nucleus. To an analyzer tuned for mammals, a nucleated red cell looks like a white cell, and the count is worthless.
So the answer in avian and exotic practice stayed a person, a slide and a microscope. Someone counts a few hundred cells by eye and multiplies up. It is slow, it is costly, and two technicians reading one smear can return different numbers.
“In avian and reptile veterinary medicine we haven’t had great automated methods for quantifying blood cells in birds and reptiles. The analyzers that we use for mammals can’t do it accurately,” the veterinary clinical pathologist Kyle Webb said in 2021, when Moichor announced its seed round.
A gap the big labs skipped
Veterinary diagnostics in the United States is large and concentrated, and the volume sits with dogs and cats. Exotic species are a rounding error in that revenue, which is why the automation never arrived. Clinics treating parrots, bearded dragons and ferrets shipped smears out and waited days for a hand count.
Moichor’s bet was that counting is an image problem. Photograph the smear, train a model to recognise heterophils, lymphocytes, thrombocytes and hemoparasites in each species, and the count becomes reproducible. A count also means nothing without knowing what is normal for that species, so the company says it is building the world’s largest species-specific reference interval library.
Three biology students and a grandfather
The company did not start with animals. Sherveen Karbasiafshar, who goes by Shevy Karbasi, was a Penn State biology undergraduate whose grandfather was having weekly blood counts during lung cancer treatment.
“My grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer and I had to take him each week to have a CBC done. I noticed the results took a long time to come back. It was inconvenient,” he told Penn State News.
With Matthew Chen, Thanh Le and a wider student team he built HemoGo: a smartphone app plus a test strip reader letting chemotherapy patients run their own counts at home. It took the entire $30,000 prize pool at Penn State’s Inc.U competition, the first time one team won all of it. Writing in Newsweek in March 2019, Karbasiafshar said the group had collected $45,000 in non-dilutable funds in a single year.
The pivot came out of the research. Looking for who actually lacked automation, they found avian and reptile clinicians. Le, who became chief technology officer while finishing a doctorate, put it plainly: “Veterinary medicine is still an old-school business, especially when it comes to diagnostics.”
Berkeley, then the round that was two rounds
Moichor Inc was incorporated in Delaware in 2019. The founders graduated that May and moved to Berkeley. In an Invent Penn State question and answer, Karbasi put the company at $750,000 raised, four clinics using the service and more than fifty in the pipeline.
Moichor went through Y Combinator in Winter 2021. On April 15, 2021 it announced $4 million in seed capital led by Neotribe Ventures. The Form D filed three weeks later reports something larger: $5,044,998 sold to eleven investors.
A second offering got no press release at all. A Form D filed February 14, 2023 records $6,223,088 sold to ten investors. Startup trackers still carry this company at $4.0 million or $5.17 million. The filings say $11,268,086.
Out of the lab and into the clinic
The reference lab came first: hematology, chemistry, cytology, endocrinology, urinalysis, parasitology and microbiology, with species-specific panels for avian, reptile, hoofstock and exotic companion mammals beside the canine and feline work. Then came Pathview, a benchtop device that keeps the sample in the building, advertised at fifteen minutes for preliminary results.
Distribution followed. Moichor is a listed diagnostics integration inside ezyVet, one of the larger practice management systems, so orders and results move without rekeying. In February 2026 Zomedica Corp, a publicly reporting animal health company, agreed to supply its TRUVIEW digital microscopy systems for Moichor to sell nationally, co-branded and wired into Moichor’s AI engine. Zomedica repeated the deal in its first quarter exhibit in May 2026.
By then the founders had left the operating roles. Joe Faiella was chief commercial officer on an industry podcast in late 2024 and is named chief executive in the Zomedica announcement. Y Combinator now lists Karbasi, Chen and Le under the heading Former Founders.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Form D, 2021 | Filed May 4, 2021, CIK 0001859727. First sale Mar 31, 2021. $5,044,998 offered and sold to 11 investors under Rule 506(b). Related persons: Karbasiafshar and Chen as officers and directors, Alex Salazar as director. | Public record |
| Form D, 2023 | Filed Feb 14, 2023. First sale Dec 2, 2022. $6,223,088 offered and sold to 10 investors. Same three related persons. No release or coverage of it found. | Public record |
| Announced versus filed | The 2021 release says the company “raised $4 million in seed capital.” The Form D reports $1,044,998 more. | Differs from filing |
| Zomedica agreement | Announced Feb 25, 2026 and confirmed in Zomedica’s Q1 2026 exhibit filed with the SEC on May 6, 2026. | Public record |
| Software integration | Published ezyVet integration: canine, feline, exotic mammal, avian, reptile and aquatic CBC, cytology and fecal gram stain, with results returned into the record. | Partner documentation |
| Peer-reviewed validation | A PubMed search for Moichor on Sep 22, 2026 returns zero records. No accuracy or method comparison study found. | Not found |
| Grants, trials, accreditation | No NIH or NSF award, no FDA 510(k) or PMA, no registered study, and no AAVLD, CAP or state lab accreditation in public listings or on the site. | Not found |
| Accuracy and savings figures | Advertised: 35 percent or better average savings, abnormality detection in 57 percent or more of cases, one client saving 845 technician minutes and more than $18,000 over four weeks. No methodology, sample size or clinic name. | Company-stated |
| Validation language | “Validated against clinical pathologist review across all major white blood cell populations for canine and feline patients.” No data accompanies it. | Company-stated |
| First automated exotic CBC | “In 2020, we pioneered the first fully automated Complete Blood Count (CBC) for exotic animals.” Repeated by ezyVet and by startup databases sourced from the company. No independent priority record. | Company-stated |
| Named customers | The homepage says “Trusted by leading clinics” and Pathview carries two unattributed testimonials. No clinic is named anywhere, including by Zomedica. | Not found |
| Commercial presence | Exhibited at the 2025 Southwest Veterinary Symposium, booth 1142. Team size 29 per Y Combinator. | Conference listing |
Read plainly: the capital and the commercial footprint are documented, and a listed public company has put its own product line behind Moichor’s sales channel, which is harder to fake than a testimonial. The clinical performance is not. Every number a veterinarian would need to trust a machine count, accuracy against a pathologist, precision between runs, agreement on abnormal samples, exists only as a sentence on the company’s own site.
What to watch
- A published method comparison. The field standard for a lab selling counts is an agreement study against manual differentials, and none exists.
- A new Form D. Nothing since February 2023, a long quiet stretch for a company that has since launched hardware and signed a distributor.
- Whether the placements show up in Zomedica’s consumables revenue, a public number reported quarterly and the first outside read on Moichor’s installed base.
- Named clinics, and a lab accreditation that would make the quality story auditable.
In their words
“And in many cases, the most impactful way to do that is by improving the most commonly needed diagnostics by making them more accurate, providing results in the clinic.”
Shevy Karbasiafshar, co-founder and then CEO, seed round announcement, 2021 · Company release
“This has the opportunity to really change the face of avian and reptile hematology, and that’s really exciting to me.”
Kyle Webb, board-certified veterinary clinical pathologist, 2021 release · Company release
“Veterinary medicine is still an old-school business, especially when it comes to diagnostics.”
Thanh Le, co-founder and CTO, Penn State News, 2022 · University reporting
“We have faced challenges in attracting investors, selling to customers, conducting product development, and establishing collaborations.”
Shevy Karbasi, CEO, Invent Penn State question and answer · Interview
“The integration of the TRUVIEW platform with our proprietary AI engine and pathology services allows us to provide veterinarians with a seamless, technology-enabled diagnostic experience.”
Joe Faiella, CEO, Zomedica announcement, February 2026 · Partner release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Moichor Inc, CIK 0001859727
- Public recordForm D, Moichor Inc
- Public recordZomedica Corp Form 8-K, exhibit 99.1
- Public recordPubMed search, zero records
- IndependentZomedica expands TRUVIEW distribution with Moichor
- IndependentDoctoral student draws on IST skills in AI diagnostics startup
- IndependentPenn State startup Moichor wins Inc.U competition
- InterviewWhere are they now? Shevy Karbasi
- InterviewMoichor: bringing lab-quality diagnostics in-house
- IndependentHow a Steve Jobs quote inspired a Penn State student
- PartnerAbout the Moichor integration
- IndependentMoichor exhibitor listing
- CompanyMoichor raises $4m to disrupt animal blood testing
- CompanyMoichor about page and team list
- CompanyPathview page, test menu and validation language
- CompanyMoichor company page and founder status
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
